


National Treasure

by baranduin



Category: The Lord of the Rings (Movies), The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-09
Updated: 2013-03-09
Packaged: 2017-12-04 17:49:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/713393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baranduin/pseuds/baranduin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A man and a woman in our time make a discovery in Scotland. Not quite crack!fic but almost :-) A crossover, I think, though of what I'm not sure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	National Treasure

**Author's Note:**

> Written around 2005.

* * *

The empty halls of Rivendell,  
Deserted, silent, thick with dust,  
Recall the empty hours when  
They stood as lonely citadel  
Against the coming age of Men,  
But fell, as Elrond knew they must.  
\--Ted Johnstone, “The Passing of the Elven-kind”

* * *

To say they were excited by the find would be the understatement of their lives together.

“I can’t believe it,” the woman said to the man and hugged him tight around the neck, clinging hard.

“Believe it,” he whispered. “I always knew we would find it.”

She drew back and smiled at him fondly. They’d been together for so many years now that she could barely remember a time when they had not been a part of each other’s lives. First there was the friendship that sprang up between them during their undergraduate days. Friendship turned to pointed rivalry during their advanced studies when the pickings were slim and especially for archaeologists who wanted to dig for Templar ruins in Scotland. Finally, they found the proper balance and became lovers and life partners united in purpose; nothing had shaken that equilibrium except the occasional overindulgence in single malt Scotch, at which point old grievances were taken out and given a healthy albeit loud airing.

And now they’d found it, found what no one could agree on other than it had existed at one time—the first Templar foundation in Scotland. All the authorities in the subject matter agreed that it had been hidden away in a northern glen. Everyone also agreed that it had always been difficult to find, even in its heyday. After all, that had been the point of its location—that it remain hidden from what could harm it and the fugitives from the Continent it sheltered. The order had had few friends in those days, even in Scotland. But from there, the authorities (or at least those who had written monographs or books) differed. Some said it was near a high foaming waterfall; some said it was on the shores of a hidden loch of blue water so clear and still that the stars could be seen reflected in it, sometimes even during the day if the sun was bright and high enough; some said it was nowhere near any interesting body of water. 

Most of them said it must have fallen so far into ruin—eroded by natural forces or helped along deliberately by the Templars themselves in a last need—that it would never be found.

But Ron and Bri had believed that it was there somewhere and, through the past fifteen years, they had searched for it whenever they had the chance, beginning with their honeymoon trip.

“Don’t you want to go somewhere nice ... maybe Spain ... somewhere warm?” their families had asked with varying degrees of incredulity and incomprehension written on their faces. Their friends were all academic and professional colleagues, so they had all contented themselves with quickly suppressed guffaws (which, needless to say, would be transmuted into ill-hidden envy were they to ever locate their grail).

Sniggers and disbelief had faded to grudging acceptance and, even more disheartening, lack of interest. “Oh, are you still looking for that?” was the most common refrain the past five years. Mostly, they stopped saying where they were going, and detailed inquiries were few and far between.

But now they knew they had finally found it, and the adrenalin surged hard and fast through them as they set up their tent in the hidden ravine that they suspected had not been visited in five hundred years or more.

* * *

There was a path up and into the glen, and it was overgrown with pine trees and obscured by fallen rock now covered with moss. But it was a path nonetheless, and they saw that it had been designed carefully at one time so that it clung in a winding fashion to the sides of the steep slope.

The first real hint of something was a statue of the Virgin Mary. That surprised them but did not stop them. 

“It looks like a gravestone,” Bri said as she and Ron knelt by the crumbling carving and pulled aside the tenacious green vines that clung to it.

Ron breathed out once, loudly, and then held his breath for a moment as he worked, his fingers dark with rich loam. “There are words here. Can you make them out?”

“No. It’s too worn away. Do you think it’s Mary?”

“Oh, it must be. Look at the sweetness of the expression, the posture.”

“And the sadness. She looks like she’s given everything she has to give ...”

“... and then some,” Ron finished after Bri’s voice trailed off, choked with emotion.

“It’s so beautiful.”

“Strange, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“The style of carving. It seems ... I dunno ... it’s very old yet it almost seems modern, a little art deco, if you know what I mean. Wouldn’t begin to know how to date it.”

* * *

There weren’t any crosses (no statues of Jesus, either, or knights in Templar garb). No matter what they discovered—and they soon found the main building after stumbling on the statue of Mary—there just weren’t any crosses or other emblems of Christianity.

The main building was graceful, as graceful as the statue and with the same slightly strange curving, elongated forms.

“I think this must have been a library,” Ron said after they’d tunneled their way through the overhanging growth into what might have been a large, vaulted room. It was beautiful, actually, the way the trees and shrubs entwined with the old stone, almost as if the place had been designed with that in mind, or at least with the idea of it being that way in some unimaginable future.

“Anything decipherable?” Bri asked, stepping carefully through the darkened hall, her torch held aloft. “I mean, there’s got to be something that we can decipher.”

Ron held a large book in his gloved hand, one pulled from a tumbled pile. It was clear that it had been a thick book once upon a time, though the parchment pages had compressed and crumbled away into powder over the long centuries. Perhaps it was even a Bible, or at least a New Testament. The cover was a dark brown leather, stained and torn but with the remains of a pattern on the front picked out in fine silvery lines. “How strange ... it’s not gold,” Ron said, tracing the pattern of a rayed star with one finger, careful not to actually touch it. 

“And no cross either,” Bri said. “Any letters you can make out?”

“Well, yes and no,” Ron said.

“What do you mean, love?”

“It’s like the runes on the gravestone. Can’t make out any of them either.”

“Perhaps the Templars made their own set of runes?” Bri asked, her voice small and not quite hopeful. When Ron did not reply, she continued in a whisper. “What is this place?”

* * *

They camped for two weeks at their site by the shore of a small splashing stream, though they no longer called it Templar. They did not know what to call it. They did not know what to do with what they had discovered, though they found new buildings and objects every day. They were all beautiful.

In addition to not finding any traditional Christian imagery (much less anything related to the Templars), they also did not find any human remains. Not a single bone. At that point, they did not attempt to make any excavations of what appeared to be graves; perhaps that would come at some future point.

“Do you think the People abandoned this place?” Bri asked one day as they unearthed what might have been a bed chamber. (They no longer referred to them as Templars but did not know what to call them, though they knew those who had once lived here must have been a great people, hence the nomenclature they assigned them provisionally.)

When Ron, far gone in his own investigation of a collapsed and almost-disintegrated bed, did not say anything, Bri answered her own question, at least as far as it could be answered at that stage. “I wonder why. I can’t imagine ever wanting to leave here.”

Small scraps of rich fabric gave Bri shivers up and down her spine. There wasn’t enough to tell what it had been, or even if it had been a garment, but Bri told herself it was an elegant gown that a princess of the People had worn ... even as she had no idea who that princess might have been or what she might have been doing in this unnamed and unknown place.

It seemed to have been woven of thick velvet in two colors—deep crimson and even deeper blue. As with everything else they found, even these fragments were exquisite and bore the remnants of fine embroidery.

* * *

They felt safe there and did not want to leave, but after two weeks, they had no choice but to pack up and hike out the same way they had come. They took little with them for they had not been equipped to do so. This had not been a formal expedition, though they knew they would have no trouble finding the funding for a proper one, and soon.

Ron took the strange book with him (and a rubbing of the Mary’s gravestone); he thought that, under laboratory conditions, he might be able to retrieve some actual pages and make a start at translation. Bri had taken the scrap of cloth; she was more sure than ever that it had been some lady’s gown and could not bear the thought of leaving it to the elements any longer. 

It was late evening when they arrived home. Their animals were happy to see them (the dogs loudly so, the cats less public about it). The enormous stack of mail left for them on the hall table could wait until the next day.

After a quick meal of scrambled eggs, bacon and fried mushrooms, each of them had a nice hot bath and then got into bed. They were exhausted but keyed up in an indefinable way. They knew their lives would change very soon and were not quite sure what that meant as it had never happened to them before. For now it was enough to know that change was coming and that made it all the more precious to hold their old life close.

They cuddled close in the big bed, pulling the down quilt to their chins for the night was chilly. (They loved their old house, but its heating properties left a lot to be desired.)

Ron said, “Shall we read in that book we had going before we left?”

“Good idea, darling. I don’t think I can sleep yet.”

Ron picked up the red leather-bound book from the bedside table, opened it, and began to read.

> _Frodo woke and found himself lying in bed ..._


End file.
